Sir Richard Harpin with Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba on how he built a £4.1bn business

40:37Yeah. And they didn't sell any. And that's because they're not called joggers in America. As you know, they're called sweatpants. And as soon as they worked that out, then they sold loads. And the funny thing is I got even crazier. So in 2017, we went to Melbourne because we had a pop-up store, right? And so I'm in Australia, jet lagged. I go onto the Gymshark website, it's scorching hot, and there's jumpers and puffer jackets on the website, on the Australian website. I'm like, we're not even thinking about how do you translate the business to the experience and how do we meet people where they're selfish, right?

41:17I think that when you try to impose your culture onto the world, it's actually pretty arrogant to some degree, right? You have to take the time to go in, say, okay, this is what our brand feels like. how do we make sure that we translate that feeling the emotion the values the actions the systems into this market and make it feel right for them and i think that a lot of people don't think about that when they're growing globally why was it houston do you think where jimshark any any ideas youtubers the first youtubers that were part of the jimshark roster for all from so jimshark stumbled onto influencer marketing because ben's like okay who are the coolest people that we want uh to get credibility from that we loved and then they happened to be in houston texas And then the other interesting thing might be to choose a slightly outlier city.

42:02So the weirdest thing, I spoke to John Cleese once about, because the one thing they all assumed, all Python said, we might be able to take this to Scandinavia. Obviously, it's big in Ireland, etc. We have no chance of this humor taking off in the US. And they never believed for a second they'd be big in the US. The whole thing happened because there was a guy who ran PBS in, wait for it. Now, if you had to choose a city where you wouldn't try and break Monty Python in the US, Dallas. And he, for some weird reason, just absolutely loved Python and just started putting it on in Dallas. And I suppose the logic there was, well, look, it became cultish in Dallas.

42:43And from there, they kind of go, well, you can actually break Dallas. Actually, San Francisco shouldn't be that much. Bear in mind, this is 1970s Dallas. San Francisco shouldn't be that much of a challenge. So again, it was one of these completely freak circumstances. But I often wonder, you know, with retail, if you chose, famously, we used to work with Warburton's. And when they expanded from being a Yorkshire bakery, they went one city at a time. They didn't try and go national straight away. I think it was Manchester Next or somewhere like that. And that's probably, now obviously, if you're running the business, it's difficult to say, you know, this is going to take 10 years.

43:20this is going to take 15 years because everybody wants to make a huge impression in two but there are those cases where i've always thought it's quite interesting i'm a very big fan of a company called um herdify and they argue that a lot of human behavior is just driven by copying yeah if your neighbors do it if you've got three friends who do it you're pretty happy doing it yourself and therefore concentrating on a you know a couple of geographies first so you you had a natural of naturally you went one water company at a time so the way you kind of rolled out was naturally in that that kind of approach yeah we went from uk and we did uh france as our first international market and when people say why france i joke and say uh it's really difficult to run a business in france high cost of employing people very difficult to then get rid of them and therefore it's a torture test.

44:15If it works in France, it'll work anywhere. And actually, it very nearly didn't. The reason why we did France first was that our joint venture partner in the UK was at South Stas Water. South Stas Water were 30 % owned by General Deseau, the big water company in France. So we thought, well, we can get a deal with them. We'll be able to use their brand name. It still took a year. And then they said, oh, your model won't work in our country. Don't do direct mail. You don't need the water company brand. You should come up with a new name. We came up with the name Domio. To me, it sounded more like a pizza delivery company than a water company branded plumbing cover.

45:04So, oh, and above the line advertising posters, newspapers, not direct mail. after a year the business hadn't worked out of desperation we said let's just go back to that original model eight years ago on how we launched the uk and guess what it worked it worked general service uh uh direct mail and took a failing business to it worked and if we hadn't if we hadn't made that work would have probably still today only been a uk business by the way intriguingly having worked at ogilvy an international agency for you know 30 something years every time you try and take a successful formula to another country the people in the other country will always say that won't work here yeah and the rule a colleague of mine said is that is almost always untrue unless it's japan the one exception was they said japan is genuinely probably career would be the same okay they said that is genuinely different you know if the japanese say no we're going to do something different you listen to them but one of the best examples was um a png guy called jr damski he worked for a business called um auto glass car glass and um he developed advertising which made the uh the windscreen replacement engineers the hero of the ad came up with the jingle autoglass repair we all remember that we all remember in every country they said oh it won't work in our country and guess what it did the guy that took autoglass to a 24 billion pound value business in 23 years a key part of the model was rolling out that jingle and that format but under different brand names in 30 30 to 40 countries around the world yeah absolutely yeah of course when you think about it i mean why okay you're most people most of the time i'm not in a buying situation yeah people are not generally aware that people who repair or who replace also repair yeah it is the entire description of your proposition basically in one slightly irritating but very memorable jingle why would you try and change that yeah so take that principle back to the global model and i call it the 15 percent rule if you as a founder are out looking at different countries that you might go into and find that you've got to adapt your model by more than 15 percent i would say think again because one day you might be in 20 countries and if it was 25 different in every country the rest of the people complexity and disaster versus having a very simple um simple model so change it the very minimum if you have to change it a lot then that's the wrong country to go into okay so we went to mentorship what's next so the next one would be evolution, not revolution.

48:22And there is a role for revolution, but that's at the start of the business. And it could be copying and then coming up with something that's just a bit different and could be revolutionary. Thereafter, revolution is dangerous. It's two steps removed from what you're currently doing. But equally, if you don't keep evolving your business, that's even more dangerous uh we know the models of um examples of uh nokia uh yellow pages itself is now a shadow of its former self and um uh blackberry if you watch the at the netflix movie then uh gone and what about this one steve jobs unfortunately died in 2011 when apple was worth 350 billion dollars and what were the shareholders thinking at the time?

49:19Oh, we're really worried with Steve gone, there's not going to be a revolutionary new product. And actually there hasn't been. No. AirPods, Apple Watches, Apple Car. Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo.

50:13Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Hear that? That's now Crispy and McCrispy Strips meeting creamy Caesar sauce. Sounds extra crispy. Caesar sauce at McDonald's for a limited time. He was the first to die, wasn't he? Exactly. I genuinely think with their brand power, they could have transformed urban mobility with that, okay?

50:54And, you know, they couldn't make the numbers work. You're absolutely right. There will be eventually a folding phone about six years after Samsung introduced it. I mean, if we're being absolutely honest. I think one of the biggest things they've made, because i always talk about um um the steve jobs and and also uh the the tim cook combo right is that you you had one of the best revolutionary people genuine revolutionary person that understood how humans actually behave versus this like world that creators and marketers tend to build which is not actually is far away from reality right uh and then you add like one of the biggest evolutionary people, which is Tim Cook, which is how do we refine, refine, refine, and get it to a big...

51:42Yeah, because at the end of the day, if you don't have great evolution, especially on the science and IQ side, then revolution doesn't even work in scale, right? So you need the combo. But if you have to pick one or the other, evolution over revolution, if you can't get the revolution right right yeah but also it goes back to step number five uh hiring your replacement and uh i'm a i'm a fox far too many ideas uh and every entrepreneur with loads of ideas needs a hedgehog somebody that can say no put up the prickles ignore that harebrained idea and just keep going in a simple, methodical direction.

52:28What's lovely about that, by the way, is that fox and hedgehog distinction is something like 2 ,500 years old. It's some fragment of Greek, which is the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one thing. Yeah, it's a fantastic distinction. And you can't choose between one or the other. Big, successful businesses had both. Apple being a great example of Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur, and Tim Cook, the hedgehog and the proven chief exec. And when you think about the ratio of what is needed for a company to break through, maybe in the early days you need the revolution, the story, the inspiration.

53:10But once that fire is lit, it's all about making sure you sustain that as much as possible because really that feeling radiates across all the different product lines, right? Exactly. A proven chief exec can't found a business and do the founders phase. That's got to be the entrepreneur. But then when it comes to scaling the business, an entrepreneur will say, well, I better come up with some new ideas. not i just want to scale this great idea that we've already got and i made many mistakes i thought well let's get into smart home devices and invented a a product called leak bot and with the help of others i got into doing furniture warranties because i thought that would be an extension of home assistance cover those things didn't work very well and the leak bot i mean And Hive weirdly got rid of that as well, didn't they?

54:07They had a kind of leak device, which I always thought was a bloody good idea. I mean, actually, the people who should have been paying for the leak bot was the insurance companies, really. Because although everybody worries about fire, by far the biggest cost now since we got rid of it. Damage following escape of water. Damage following escape of water is the biggest source of claims, effectively. Since chip fat, deep fat fryers were taken on and replaced by the oven chip. and actually it's not that complicated advice is it it just detects a long period of flow and then alerts you very quickly exactly and that product is working it's um a listed on the main uk stock market and is doing well but for home serve in the grand scheme of things it was a distraction for us okay so we did i did eventually get uh uh get rid of it out of the out of the group but shouldn't have got into that in the first place but you spun it off and it now it now works yes yeah but shouldn't have got into it at all shouldn't have got into furniture warranties they were two steps removed from the the core that's interesting there's this concept in evolutionary biology called the adjacent possible there are adjacencies where you can take a brand sometimes there are completely unrelated things of course as in caterpillar getting into clothing for example but generally things that are two or three stages removed don't work yes they're going to be a distraction yeah focused on the the core but also i think there's a bit here called de-evolution so sometimes businesses become too big and unwieldy they're trying to do too many things and they should say right let's get rid of something and we'll either close it down or we'll sell it off.

55:59Rory, can you think of examples of where that's successfully been done? Well, interestingly, generally speaking, mergers destroy value and actually breakups create value. Yes. There's some massively extreme cases. I mean, Philips probably has created more value in the companies it got rid of than in the business it kept, for instance. It's very strange because, you know, there's a huge fashion for mergers and there are huge general biases against breaking up companies. But if you look at actual overall value creation, the latter is by far the bigger, the more successful approach. Yeah, and it comes to my step number nine of hone your character and what sort of characters are we looking for in successful business people?

56:50And one of them, I would say, is low ego. and high ego would be, let's expand the business even more, let's get into more categories, let's go and do a massive acquisition, and as you say, Rory, they have high risk, and they don't work. They're sort of massive aggrandizement, I mean, there's a brilliant thing, I met Seb James yesterday, and there's apparently a guide written for company chairman, which warns you of early signs that your chief executive is going mad. And it's things like an enormous new corporate headquarters, weird obsession with tiny details, massive, absolute obsessive preoccupation with the belief that they're underpaid.

57:36And there are about sort of four or five of these conditions, which are basically early warning signs. And it usually happens, apparently, if you've had five or six years of uninterrupted success, it's very difficult not to get delusional. Because you start to think you walk on but they get bored don't they and therefore they want to do it doing more stuff even if that stuff is wrong so i think the guys at coinbase what they do is they run their business like like a vc where they allow people to actually build other stuff so that people don't get bored with the main thing right so so it allows people to still be able to scratch that that's why you're seeing actually a lot of entrepreneurs now being creators, right?

58:18To keep themselves from being bored. Because sometimes boredom, something as simple as that human trait, can be the demise of a business because you're not occupied enough or you're outside of the bit that got you really excited about the business, right? By the way, the other really interesting thing about this, which is it's a billion-dollar company which basically grew itself with physical direct mail and brand partnerships, which are two of my total passions. So partly, I think, the potential for really interesting brand partnerships, or as they call them in fashion, collabs, I think, it's a brilliant thing, which is the natural assumption is we have to do this on our own.

58:57And it's a kind of egotistical assumption. In fact, what you had is you had all the innovation. They had the brand where when the bit of direct mail landed from, you know, Staffordshire Water. Nobody thought, who the hell are these guys? Is this a scam? And effectively, you get the zeal and the energy and the entrepreneurialism of the small company and the scale and the reputability of the large company. I always think both parties gain. I mean, you see it in, I've got really interested in watches, and they're these really sort of, we've just seen that thing, the Swatch AP, we talked about it last time.

59:33Same collab, yeah. The potential for those things, I think, where the large company gains cool points in innovation and the small company gains a scale and automatic reputability. I think the scale for that kind of symbiotic relationship is enormous, and it's just completely underexplored. Really, really interesting. And then you get unnecessary ones that just happen because everyone's copying, right? I think the perfect synergy is when you have that big, you saw that with Nike and Cortese. right? Like you see cool and up and coming with like reputable, because there's a value exchange there. And then you get like the formal exchanges where people are like, well, what the hell's going on here?

1:00:15Right. You saw that with, I think a classic one in culture was Run DMC and Aerosmith, right? It's like two cultures coming together and there was a value exchange happening there. And then people don't actually think about that when it comes to collapse. I think it's just, I mean, I always watch the watch business because it's like the Galapagos islands of like brand weirdness you know but you have a sort of you know studio underdog partnership with a kind of venerable swiss watch watchmaker and they actually but you know i think they're actually very very interesting i i actually you know it's a minute if you think about it and i'm going to take a bit of a you know hit here which is there's a part of wpp called mando connect which just do these brand partnerships i always treat it like my secret weapon because if i'm stuck, they always come up with a good idea.

1:01:04And I go, why are you only 10 people? Because in most of these large companies we deal with, there's only one person responsible for brand partnerships because they're not expensive, so they don't get that much attention. You see, the media people, there are hundreds of people looking at the media because it costs a fortune. But the other thing is that there's nobody with much of an incentive to promote them. You know, ad agencies want to promote advertising you can imagine the whole thing whereas actually these very elegant simple solutions where hold on why are you trying i mean what i used to make a joke about this about companies who i said what tends to happen is someone comes up with a great idea for a new airline toilet and instead of selling it to partnering with boeing they decide to start their own airline and make their own plane you know what i mean and actually just if you you know focus on the bit that makes you different and unique and then amplify it through partnerships with other people.

1:01:58But that's why I say that the reason why I believe that most people are getting influencer marketing wrong is because they're treating influencers as media, not as brand partners, right? Interesting. Very good point. Because if then the goal is, how do we use our brand trust and collab with your community trust and let's go on a journey because it's not going to happen over one direct mail or one post, then people will change the way that they work with creators. Whereas really what they're saying is, what is more efficient between paid ads and influencers and we're just going to go very transactional and see the value based on like CPMs.

1:02:33And I'm like, that doesn't make any sense because it's a relationship business, right? And their audience have to believe that your relationship with the creator is authentic. Over time. Yeah, over time. And it deepens over time. 100%. And so we talked about hiring your replacement and we jumped to number nine, but it'll be great to get number six, seven, and then we'll go to eight. So it'll be great to get like number six what's number six number six was go global with locals so we talked about that one um the one that we haven't done is number eight yeah which is have a not to-do list what is number seven again just for number seven was evolution not revolution and a number eight is a not to-do list?

1:03:18Everybody, we all have to-do lists because business is about getting stuff done and we all need some way of keeping track of all the jobs that we need to do today and this week and this month. But I learned the hard way from trying to do too many things that what's more important than a to-do list is a not to-do list. So a lot of people, I know we've been talking about steve jobs a lot but if you look at like bezos if you look at everybody the only person that's an exception for this is someone like eon musk who just does well i think that he actually has a grander plan it just looks more random to all of us but there's talk about the fact that steve jobs superpower is not creativity and storytelling it was focus saying we're not going to do saying no was actually a superpower we're not going to do this we're only going to do this and it'll be great for you to expand on the not to do list yeah so um uh this comes back to um uh the second best business book i've ever read after my own of course how to make a billion in nine steps uh that second best book is good to great by jim collins yeah and i ran home serve the good to great way.

1:04:34And we took some of Jim's 12 principles, six of his 12 link exactly to my nine steps. And I thought we're on the cusp of being great in home service. This was 2019. And back to mentoring, I thought I just need Jim Collins one-to-one for a whole day. and so I emailed him and got an instant message back didn't have to chase him like I did with that guy Nigel Morris and he said I can't have a whole day with you one-to-one when I'm not lecturing in football stadiums of 10 ,000 people but I run a chief exec's retreat for two days in Boulder Colorado every year and I'd like to give you a place and he what do you think I did well i emailed him back and said jim i'm most grateful but can i be really cheeky because that guy tom russon who runs home serve america which is two-thirds of the value of home serve i don't want him to miss out on the the two days of training and hear your messages second hand so can i bring him along as well little did we know when we rocked up in boulder colorado in february 2020 literally three weeks before the whole of the world locked down under kobe just oh yeah best two days of business training of my life and um i was sitting next to jack jack was a multi-billionaire in food services australian 76 years old and they're learning like i was and do you know what?

1:06:18He made his money with Domino's Pizza across the whole of Australia and he also owns Burger King Master franchise across the whole of Australia. Which is called Hungry Jack. Hungry Jack after Jack that was sitting next to me round the table because they weren't allowed to call it Burger King in Australia because there was someone else who was called something King. So it's got the same logo effectively or the same logo type. And he's Jack. he was talking away at the other side of the table and um jack reached the cross and he whispered in my ear and he goes do you know what richard what jim is telling us is that we are foxes we're always looking for the next opportunity and we need to be hedgehogs and say no to ideas and um that's where the the not to do list came from and what um the bit of learning was go back to your management teams when you leave this course and ask them three questions.

1:07:19First of all, what are you passionate about in your business? And that will normally be your purpose. Secondly, what can you be the best at? It doesn't need to be in the whole world. It just needs to be in the geography where you're operating. And thirdly, what's your economic engine how are you going to make money what's your monetization and the hard bit is answer those three questions in one sentence of no more than 20 words and we did that a year ago in business leader an organization that i run in the uk to help medium-sized businesses to scale following my nine steps and we said at business leader we inspire our founder and ceo members to fast forward their growth through unique content and facilitated learning anybody in business leader that's doing anything that doesn't fit with those words needs to stop doing it and put that activity on their not to-do list that's very similar to the famous uk rowing team isn't it which is does does it make the boat go faster?

1:08:27Which was their simple criterion for any activity, you know. And then he travels, right? Because they talk about the fact that the closer to zero, the better. Because then you don't actually need a lot of alignment meetings. Because the question becomes, does it make the boat go faster? If the answer is yes, then we do it. If the answer is no, then we don't. But then that's universal across the entire organization, right? Because if you make it way too complicated, like we've gone down to the point where we don't actually ask people for a long-winded brief we understand what their goal is and obviously there's the conversion funnel all the way down to community we turn it into a we talk about it all the time but then it's like why do you want people to think feel do no think feel say and do and then how you get about that is like becomes really really like practical but you don't try to over complicate things you're like actually at its core base principles, what is it that we're looking to do here every single day?

1:09:23And then can we avoid meetings by making sure that it's very simple and very intuitive and is a yes or no answer? That's really insightful. Exactly right. And yeah, if it's not simple and it doesn't fit with those 20 words that everybody in the organization needs to know, then it goes on the not-to-do list. Wow. And, okay, so there's a lot to process. And to close out, the ninth was... By the way, it doesn't mention money at all, does it? It's entirely a customer-focused purpose. Yeah, because you mustn't chase money. Yeah. Money is an output of a business having a great purpose, being slightly better than the competition, and having a way to monetize those things.

1:10:10And if you do, then money is the output and profit and the best businesses focus on the purpose and the USP and then profit naturally flows. Because David Ogilvie had a list which started with to make a profit for our shareholders every year and went on with nine other things. And Marvin Bowers, who's his friend, who's the McKinsey guru, just said, any business that puts profit at number one deserves to go under. and so it was moved down to number nine but you know interestingly and i think that's one of the problems you get with with the financialization which is that companies start to think their investors are their target audience not their customers yeah and it fundamentally creates this massive distortion yeah and what you've realized is that well the age or saying is the customer's always right but i think the signals rather than what it is that they say it's more what they do and how they react but then also the difference between different companies is the collective of people that they have right so if you don't have a purpose that unifies them you can have all the brilliant people that you want but why are they here together to do you see that in sports teams that try to buy their way to a championship if there's nothing that's unifying them then when it really gets difficult how do they come together and stay together right it's really difficult and it's about the the characteristics of that team and i think it takes us to my final step step number nine is hone your character and i spent many years uh in performance reviews with my chairman and insisting everybody in home serve had a twice a year performance review and guess what happens in those it's um uh i would be miserable because uh my chairman would say uh you've got a few really big strengths but you've got so many weaknesses richard and i'd walk out that meeting feeling really miserable focusing only on my weaknesses and what i learned was don't worry about your weaknesses those are the things that we don't like doing, focus on a couple of strengths, and then hire people to do those other things.

1:12:33And that's the dynamic team. And really, the only thing that I was good at was described in two words. And that was inspire breakthrough. And I think if you went to the 10 chief execs in HomeServe that ran each of the 10 countries and said, what did I do? I challenged them and I inspired them. And as a team, we delivered more than we ever dreamt of. And so I thought after HomeServe, I want to put that only talent to good use to be inspiring other entrepreneurs here in the UK. We're really good at startups, but we're pretty poor at scale-ups. So let's focus on those medium-sized businesses that are turning over between 3 million and 100 million and give them the nine steps that they can successfully scale and become a large company one day.

1:13:32Some of them become the next billion-pound businesses like HomeServe and Octopus Energy and 54 others where the founder is still involved. are we i mean is there a media problem here which is that we're very reluctant in the uk to make heroes of our homegrown businesses the u.s does to an extent you know you're a bit of a rock star if you founded one of these things british journalists trying to treat any manifestation of capitalism with deep suspicion but also you know you can make a list of 15 20 25 really really innovative and interesting british companies just by sitting down and you know you mentioned Octopus.

1:14:15You know, Ocado is probably more interesting than any other grocery delivery company. Obviously, we've got some established businesses, which are fantastic at what they do. We don't really lionize those things at all in terms of press coverage, do we? That's why we're here, right? No, exactly. Yeah, because honestly, I've spoken to... Nobody would know in Britain. You say that, you know, Americans didn't know that Jim Shark was British. But nobody would realize that Jim Shark was a global business success story outside people who study this kind of thing. In the US, it would have been universally known.

1:14:54Yeah, but also it was only until it got the valuation that people were like, oh, we're proud to... It's only when you've hit the ridiculous milestone that you get the praise here. I actually think that if you think about Britain and the UK, like we have a phenomenal crop of founders and a lot of them have to go to the States or other places to even get a look in. Right. And actually going back to if we as an organization, well, as a community, as a country invested back into our founder system. I don't know whether it was you, Rory, that mentioned the fact that actually if people would instead of giving a student loan, we're given an opportunity to start a business early on.

1:15:34like the amount of like jobs we can create the amount of innovation we can foster the amount of like influence we can have over like whether the current state of business will be phenomenal and and i think that we should actually be spending more time fanning the flames of people that want to have the audacity to build something and get us out of the mess we're currently in right now yeah we need to showcase more of those unicorns that did get to that billion status um and uh Believe it or not, the average age of setting up a business is 41 years old, where we need to get onto it earlier. I'm a great believer that we should be starting this journey with school kids.

1:16:16Yeah. Only 34 % of secondary school kids, 14 and above, have any form of entrepreneurial experience. So we need entrepreneurship as a career on career hubs in every school in the country. We need organizations like Young Enterprise to be getting those messages out there. I remember that. Experience a membership that backs your business journey with American Express Business Platinum. When you pay with membership rewards points for all or part of an eligible flight booked with a qualifying airline through Amex Travel, you can get 35 % of those points back, up to 1 million points back per calendar year.

1:16:59American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash platinum. At OLLI, we've got wellness down to a science. From PMS to pregnancy to menopause, our women's wellness line offers science-backed support for every stage. No judgment, no shame. None of the stigma. Just supplements designed to meet you wherever you're at. OLLI, choose science over shame. Find support at a retailer near you or on ollie.com. That's O-L-L-Y dot com.

1:17:38It's phenomenal. Over to you. I mean, it wouldn't be that difficult. to, I mean, one of my arguments, by the way, is that you should be able to use your student loan for anything you like, not just buying higher education. I mean, you know, if you think about it, it'd be ridiculous if you said, okay, young people are allowed to apply for a£37 ,000 car loan, but you have to spend it on a car. Because other people say, oh, I'd rather spend it on education. But equally, there are a load of people whose career prospects will be better enhanced by getting a van than getting a degree. And so it's, you know, it's a very good idea, I think, to give people a financial windfall leg up.

1:18:18You know, I'd make the terms of the loan more generous as well, but that's a secondary matter. It's a really good idea to, you know, if you want to improve probably people's lifetime wealth, giving them access to, you know, a reasonable four-figure sum early in life for the purposes of experimentation is really, really, it's probably that's the moment at which you intervene. Because then you spend the educational time finding where you're going to place your bet, right? So, it becomes very intentional. It's not just learning for learning's sake. It's at the end of this, I'm going to have an investment coming into me, my first seed investor, if you will, pre-seed, if anything.

1:18:58And I'm going to spend this time trying to figure out where I'm going to place that bet, right? It changes phenomenally, like the the mindset you go into education you'll have way more people flooding into it saying okay i'm going in a sense of discovery to find that practically where i'm going to put my investment right and i think that that is changes the mindset of the whole entire country and you can change a generation the other bit is the the worry around um there's a massive opportunity in ai yeah but uh call centers are going to be a fraction of their former selves and so there's all these white-collar workers that need to become blue-collar workers.

1:19:38And back to Rory's point around van-based services, we're all reluctant DIYers. There are more services to the home. And if we can get call center people that are going to be made redundant through AI to retrain as handymen, oven cleaners, dog walkers, garden tidy uppers, then those are things that we don't necessarily want to do ourselves that can be great. Equally, I would argue that the remaining people in call centres should be very well paid because they're the people who, there are a few reasons I'm concerned about the death of the call centre, one of which is it's free feedback. It's the feedback loop where you discover the problems that the website can't solve.

1:20:27Yeah. The most important feedback. But also, I've always believed that if they could actually measure their value in the same way that salespeople would, could, in terms of retention and problem solving, the best call center workers would be page six figures. I'll give you an example. You know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I slept really late yesterday. But because I was trying to sort out a flight that there was a bug on the website there was a bug on the website and they ended up like instead of giving me a round trip flight they just booked my trip for the return date and it was like I paid a lot of money for it so I was like oh my god I have to change this there was a person so I was like okay I need to sort this out and it was they really screw you for some reason basically what they say is you can change it if you do it before midnight And by the way, that happened at 11.59, right?

1:21:21This is bullshit. I have an exam. I won't name the brand. But I booked a flight. Let me get this right. I booked a flight which I subsequently needed to cancel. And when it said you're allowed to cancel the same day, I assumed it meant 24 hours. Because like you, I was booking at 11 o 'clock at night. So I ring back at 9 o 'clock the following morning. And they said, no, no, no. As soon as, it's like fucking Cinderella. As soon as midnight strikes, okay? You're no longer allowed to. Well, again, this is a bit unfair on people who book their flights later in the evening. But they were completely intransigent on the whole thing.

1:21:55Yeah, and the first customer experience person was like, oh, no, we can't do anything, et cetera. Who the fuck designed that? It's probably some product on legacy mainframe system, isn't it? You know, God knows. Yeah, but then they passed me on to somebody more senior. And not only was I, like, ready to, like, I didn't want to be a Karen and say, oh, I can do this. but not only was i frustrated basically saying i'm never going to buy from this company again this now the person says we understand that you booked it at 59 that's a human error i can solve that for you and then they ended up saying all you have to do is spend another 350 pounds for us to get your um return flat all combined and i'll do it for you and have an email by tomorrow that changed completely your your mood i will never use you ever again to thank you you're one yeah yeah instead of me saying i want a refund give my money i've got shop elsewhere i spend 350 that's the difference right so the role goes from being just like answering requests to i can flip somebody from being at a negative sentiment to a positive it's going to be very difficult for an ai agent to do that isn't it so i agree let's have a smaller number of call center people that we pay and you give quite a lot more money to yeah yeah but richard this has been phenomenal you've been very generous with your knowledge, your time, your energy.

1:23:18I'm ready to run through a brick wall. But what's the parting message that you have for all of our listeners? What's the one key message that you want people to grasp and take with them? The UK is a great place from which to run a global business. Whatever the problem, turn it into a bigger opportunity. Never a better time than to start a business right now that we need to also focus on scale-ups, not just startups. So I made far too many mistakes in my business career. That's why I wrote my book, How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps. Do get a copy. If you're already turning over three million pounds or more, come to one of my free growth workshops that take place in my dining room every week in Marleybone.

1:24:06Go to the Business Leader website, businessleader.co.uk and book yourself a place. We need to double a number of large companies in this country. We only have 7 ,500 and that's going to come from scale-ups. Amazing. Fantastic. Thank you, Richard.

1:24:37I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX is the bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order.

1:25:27Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-CONTACTS